Sunday, February 08, 2009

Khaled Mattawa, AMORISCO: To Enter Another World

Narrative, whether as prose or poetry, can paint another world in vivid colors, and can transport the emotions into new places, new situations. But how can a writer perform the complex alchemy of assisting the reader to let go of the existing self, in order to sample another tongue entirely?

Rarely leaving the English language, but twisting the verse forms and the continuities and jumps of imagery, Libyan-born Khaled Mattawa calls forth an edgily foreign experience in the poems of AMORISCO (Ausable Press). The opening poem, "Against Ether," scrambles for sense:

With my certainties, I assemble the elements.

A burned suit, the earth's gloved hand a book made of petals.

Daylight evaporates before our eyes.

From there, the poem moves in and out of person and place, even alphabet and vowel. And the final stanza is deceptively neat:

In his farm my father grows what the seasons let him.

This is how he plants his crops:

He takes off his hatand lets the rain talk to him.He holds a fistful of dirtand pleads with it.

Much later in the collection, Mattawa speaks more directly, in "The In-Between":

I don't want either side of this river.I don't want my life to be the ferrybridging its banks.

The jagged clashes of matter-of-fact language with phrases torn and collaged into the work evenutally, for me, painted a clarity around what it is to transpose from one culture into another: You leave behind significant pieces of yourself in the "other place" and you suffer whiplash of the soul, repeatedly.

REDRESS

The relative who wronged youyou've already mistreated twice. ...Say now the alkaline words of forgiveness,and yes, go ahead and weep out the blowsyou've received and recklesssly thrownuntil supplication is all that pegs you to life.

And when you rise, know that you are notworthy of disdain or affection, but thatfrom now on you'll have to tighten your fistson the last embers of love.

After such dark fire in so many of the poems, the pair that are addressed to a missing child in one's life sit in the later part of the book like unexpectedly tender fruit; here is a passage I particularly like from "Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child":

Night girl, night girlyour book is full now.You have drawn all the pictures.You have seen many weepers.Stars held your sky in place and moonsfloated on your lakes and washed them.

Mattawa's careful paintings balloon into massive murals in the concluding piece, a 14-page sequence of long-lined stanzas called "East of Carthage: An Idyll." It's addressed to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, and sizzles with embers, smoke, and sensuous extensions into the present. A burnt-sand odyssey of risk and regret, it's worth reading multiple times, especially aloud, for the woven rhythms and tastes:

The deserts they crossed, the plains eastor north of here fall like sands from my hands.

Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny,native and stranger, prodigal and peasant --

And finally, the words reach the distant waters of the sea:

At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster,douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow,The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah.

There is much of love in this slim volume -- and much also of longing and of the soreness of the journey.

No comments:

ABOUT KINGDOM BOOKS

Kingdom Books is a mystery collectors' resource in northeastern Vermont. Beth Kanell, co-owner with her husband Dave, writes the reviews here of mysteries and crime fiction, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (as well as an author of Vermont-based mysteries and poetry). Dave Kanell's sleuthing record among mystery books takes first place, and he enjoys a good conversation on the latest and greatest crime fiction.

Kingdom Books in Vermont

Mostly mysteries, mostly signed ...

Get New Posts by by Email -- emails are never sold or shared

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE! Open 24/7 Online

The former inventory of Kingdom Books is available as a full collection -- please do ask us. kingdombks@gmail.com Kingdom Books also still has a few individual items for sale at an eBay shop. Check them out here.